Honeybath's Haven Read Free Page B

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    â€˜Charles, my dear fellow, how nice to see you! It’s a shocking long time since we got together.’ Lightfoot sat down with perfect ease – or at least with perfect ease of manner, since he appeared not quite to have mastered the equipment that had presumably been Flannel Foot’s speciality in the burgling way. ‘We really have very few visitors nowadays, and Melissa and I have to entertain ourselves as we can. She has probably told you how we’ve invented this little game like charades. I’m being a burglar at the moment, and she’s not quite sure whether I’m after her placket or her purse. Would you care to join in? You can be Chief Inspector Thomas Thompson. “Youthful, black-haired Chief Inspector Thomas Thompson”, according to the Daily Express of the 4th December 1937. He’s my grand adversary, you know. We’re like Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes. The worthy Thompson has hundreds of coppers prowling the suburbs of London on the hunt for me, but he hasn’t caught me yet. It’s the flannel, you see. So light a foot will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint, as Shakespeare’s Friar Lawrence expresses it.’
    â€˜I’m very glad to see you keeping up your spirits, Edwin.’ Honeybath managed to say this with difficulty. Although unexpected circumstances were apt to prove him a man of considerable resource, he didn’t yet quite see how to tackle this situation. He wondered whether Lightfoot – this time like Shakespeare’s Hamlet – was but mad north-north-west, and knew a hawk from a handsaw when other winds were blowing. But if this Flannel Foot business was a joke it seemed necessary to believe with Melissa that it was a bad one. Honeybath felt sorry for Melissa. That she was herself a tiresome woman didn’t obscure the fact that her husband’s freakishness – even if it was no more than that – couldn’t be a thing at all nice to live with. And Lightfoot’s deft rubbish about charades was alarming rather than composing. It somehow suggested the rapid cunning which the truly insane are reputed sometimes to command.
    â€˜But enough of this nonsense,’ Lightfoot said. He spoke with a lightness of air that decidedly didn’t ring true. ‘Just let me remove these cerements, my dear Charles, and we’ll have a marvellous talk.’ He bent down and began unwrapping the ludicrous flannel from his feet. ‘And our compotations shall be in Château Leoville-Poyferre. Business is a little slack, you know, but I can still, praise God, run to a decent claret.’
    Melissa Lightfoot ( née Prout) having already referred to the vinous resources of the household, Honeybath was prompted to wonder whether the couple had both taken to drink. He looked cautiously about him. The Lightfoots’ sitting-room had formerly suggested by various touches that it was only one floor down from a fully-functioning studio. This effect was absent now, and what Honeybath surveyed was a big and rather expensively furnished room of a neutral and uninteresting sort. Since the Lightfoots, whatever else was to be said of them, were neither of them personalities of the most conforming order, there was thus a kind of uneasy hiatus between themselves and their surroundings. They had lived here for a long time, but one felt them to be now perched in the place without attachment to it – a fact uncomfortably suggesting that they had ceased to feel much attachment to one another. Moreover there was a good deal of dust and even cobweb around, and in a large Chinese jar in a window embrasure Melissa had created a somewhat aggressive arrangement of hothouse flowers which had now been in evident decline for many days. This last appearance depressed Honeybath a good deal. Dead flowers in a dwelling over which a woman presides are a signal which it doesn’t require a psychiatrist to interpret.
    Lightfoot was